Combat is 5e's advantage/disadvantage on steroids. I think Jeff may have suggested something along one of these lines once.

The Tarot thing are relatively out of nowhere I think.

Motives instead of classes is more like Vampire than anything else I can think of that I read, but still pretty much out of nowhere.

Calm is obviously like Call of Cthulhu Sanity and probably nobody would want it any other way, though I hope Downtime puts a new spin on it.

Most of the feedback has been too good to be useful. Just a lot of "I like the__! and the__!" which is nice but the sample is kind of self-selected--they're backing it so they're getting what they want. If anybody reading has anything they just thought of, hit me with it.

I'm curious about how long-term play will work. In sunday's D&D game, we thought Agnes Steelheart was just fucking dead the other day until shenanigans restored her and it was clear it hurt. I want to figure out if the stack of rewards and interrelationships Demon City creates will eventually make that happen with a PC that's around long enough, or if you just basically have to choose between horror and that level of attachment.
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...and eventually stumbled on the remnants of an elven army cowering on a mountaintop a few miles from the great volcano.

The proud fair folk were suspicious of a party of mostly half-elves and--possibly worse--tieflings--but they camped together for the night.

They were then--of course--attacked by lizardmen. One of them hurled a globe of mutation at one of the basically totally incompetent elven princes (a second eye and then head began to emerge from the side of his neck) but the party eventually fought them off.

In the morning, the party asked the elves they'd just saved for help finding the volcano and the dragon egg inside, but, terrified, they politely begged off and hiked out into the jungle.

Agnes Steelheart burned with contempt at their cowardice "Good luck with your extra face, loser!"
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Also, somewhere along the line the party picked up two things:

1. Smudge the elf thief who sucks at rolling dice

2. 11 doses of a potion form Hot Springs Island that makes "the body and mind forget the last hour"

Also the cleric was drinking a lot of wine.

This lead to the following situation no less than three times:

Agnes Steelheart would get really pissed at how useless Smudge was in a fight.

Agnes would be like "Ugh! Men! Useless!"

Agnes would get knocked out and be almost dead (and, in one case, actually dead).

Agnes would awake to find Smudge the elf thief who sucks at rolling dice standing over her feeding her this potion, feeling fine but having no idea how she got there and not remembering any of the dice rolls that made her disgusted with Smudge the elf thief who sucks at rolling dice and thinking he was pretty cool. For now.
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So anyway just before this session I was trying to think how I'd write up this ruined temple they came upon and I was also like I need a muffin.

So I got in the elevator and there were three people and one of them had a big box with styrofoam sticking out.

"Hey," (lightbulb) "is that box all packing material?"

"Uh...." they thought I was going to yell at them about the environment "yeah?"

"Can I have it?"

So then I threw it together with some stuff I already had and proceeded to build a Temple of Mariyah on the kitchen table...

(Complete with the stryofoam head as the remains of a colossal sculpted head of Mariyah)

I got pretty into it. I made a whole key of the secrets hidden under all the rocks and crannies.

I was fucking prepared...

...but you know how players are, spending all that work on something pretty much guarantees they'll be like "This looks scary, let's go fart in a pumpkin".

Even better, though, there was a massive, brutal fight with a near tpk. The serpentmen had a hydra that almost bit everyone's head off until Arafel used the 9 Bones Necklace to get possessed by the Blue Medusa.

So we solved the Who Would Win In A Fight Between Medusa and Hydra question the Greeks somehow never got around to answering.

Medusa.

Then Medusa will then be like "Where am I?" because she wasn't the one who decided to possess this tiefling and then wander in a random direction (roll 40k scatter dice) and...oh dear...look right at one of those reflective pillars.

Notch off one more dose of Rewind Potion.

Anyway it was a fun game. The cleric of Mariyah kept staring dazzled at the temple

Friday, November 17, 2017

This is for a project on The Planes with art by me, Scrap Princess and a writer who is neither of us but is a secret for now.

The Planes in this version, courtesy of the art-brief I was given, are:The Ethereal Plane: A swirly, misty transitive plane that is filled with failed, unfinished, and abandoned ideas, especially ideas from well-known fantasy heartbreaker RPGs.The Elemental Plane of Air: Inside the hollow bones of a giant bird: dead and petrified. Floating. The bird is being torn apart and disassembled by an extremely slow moving elemental maelstrom. It will take eons.The Elemental Plane of Earth: Walking the halls of a house that is being perpetually reconstructed. The Winchester Mystery House meets Frank Gehry's home. The ghost elementals of long-dead mineral miners.The Elemental Plane of Fire: An asbestos-shrouded research facility that harnesses the perpetual energy of Fire. They are trying to turn the event of fire into a tangible thing. Ever-burning Pripyat trapped in the moment of meltdown. Manned by jinns of science.The Elemental Plane of Water: A calm, highly-structured village spread across a misty island chain. The aesthetic of Mad Max in the waterways of a crumbling Vienna where scrap cars are boats. The elemental people here follow a strict, unyielding schedule.The Quantum Plane of Absence: Everything that didn't make it into the book, provided without context. Surreal and meaningless (within the lack of context). The Cremaster Cycle meets Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. [replaces the Positive Energy plane]The Quantum Plane of Presence: All things on all other planes, except forced into hazy, indeterminate meanings by new context. Slaves in the employ of a well-defined god who promises them meaning but never delivers. Eraserhead meets On a Silver Globe. [replaces the Negative Energy plane]The Meso-Elemental Plane of Asepsis: Beneath an ultraviolet sun, lead-shielded outbuildings ring a bubbled field. It looks like an armored poppy farm: a Tank Girl biodome. Nothing is native to this plane. Short-lived outsiders, toiling in a hazy atmosphere of breathable, purple-white iodine harvest one dose of the Cure-For-All-Ills every thousand years. It will only grow here. They produce and age other cures like wine. Powerful men contract diseases just to experience the wonder of their cures.The Meso-Elemental Plane of Decadence: A living flesh-city run through with veins of neon. It’s the excesses of the 80s and New Wave fashion filtered through the lens of Cronenberg or Yuzna's Society. Primitive, biological cyberpunk. Neon elementals who hypnotize with dance.The Meso-Elemental Plane of Extinction: A crooked monastery high upon a mountain, visible only from a certain angle. Perfectly ringed by a spiral of clouds. At the base of the mountain: a party and temptation to stay behind. Visually influenced by Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and Daumal’s Mount Analogue.The Meso-Elemental Plane of Rot: Inside a bulbous dome insulted by pus. Rot-technicians and disease elementals. They catalog all the sickness in the metaverse. The CDC, except the inmates are running the asylum. A syringe smokestack injects plague clouds into the Material planes.The Demi-Planes(1) A garbage dump plane, all broken and lost things end up here.(2) The living plane of Neth, except it's dead and in the process of merging with the Plane of Rot.(3) A luxurious, interdimensional inn that connects all inns everywhere.(4) A prison plane where languages are physical beings and kept imprisoned. If killed, a language ceases to exist everywhere.(5) A generically-evil castle surrounded by a pile of fallen Paladins. Whenever a Paladin over-zealously swears to "thwart evil," a copy of them ends up here where they fruitlessly assault the castle and die atop the mound.(6) A lush jungle plane that is home to an elusive, primitive tribe.(7) A two-dimensional cave plane inhabited by shadows.(8) An Escher-like palace.(9) An infinite garden of flowers on a finite island.(10) A throwback to the Lady of Pain: an endless, abandoned maze plane

I know very little about this project other than what's above, but Our Mystery Benefactor pays a fair wage, is patient and eloquent, and dwells in a vast manor where the light from high windows swims restlessly across the tiles in a criss-cross of silent halls.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

So Vice (or, more properly, one of Vice's hydra-head of affiliate sites) put up a thing a woman wrote about an RPG.

tl;dr on the article:This mesoamerican game is not as woke as it wants to be and the art is bad, but the author gives it free advertising on Vice anyway.

Let me stress up front a couple things:

I personally think the game is racist and stupid, for some but not all of the same reasons the author does.

I don't think my opinion matters much--I think the opinion on wannabe woke games that matters most is the opinion of people who are in the group affected, and people who make these kinds of games.

I think the article is interesting because it points up some conversations these people will probably never have because in each case, at least one of the two sides does not believe in having conversations, in some cases both.

Here's a summary of the article and the points it brings up but doesn't resolve (and can't resolve because it's an article by one person, not a dialogue).

1. As a child the author used games as escapism, playing out fantasies of revolt they didn't do in real life.

2. Author asserts the purpose of RPGs is to aid in thinking about difficult things.

Conversation That Will Never Happen A:

These things are very often not compatible goals.

Conversation That Will Never Happen B:

Is it even good--at least for adult activists--to crave entertainment give them 1 above? Isn't it kind of sad and defeatist?

Conversation That Will Never Happen C:

Are people going around casually assuming all games are escapist fantasies and not realizing all the other things games are for?

3. The author was skeptical of an invitation to participate in an RPG.

4. The author feels the depiction of westerners landing in the new world overtly tries to depict them as bad in some ways, but not in enough ways for the author.

Conversation That Will Never Happen D:

Is it ever possible to say a person we all agree is bad experienced and overcame hardship? At what point does it become unnecessary or too much?

5. The author feels the depiction of the mesoAmericans sexes up the women too much and (I think?) de-emphazies their mesoamerican features.

Conversation That Will Never Happen F:

Yes. Can we also talk about the effect of just bad art in general? Like how much just unbelievably bad generic art makes games about historically overlooked indigenous people look like boring jerks with boring lives baking maizecakes out of straw all day?

6. The author objects to the presence of blood rituals and human sacrifice. Also it appears slavery is not deal with in depth and the author wants it to be.

Conversation That Will Never Happen G:

Can we please either decide which of "X is traumatizing let's not include it for the sake of the traumatized/"X is traumatizing we must go into it in massive detail for the sake of the traumatized" is the Official Woke Stance?

8. The RPG writer was inspired by a novel, the author asserts its a problematic novel.

9. The RPG writer is apparently Mexican but not indigenous.

Conversation That Will Never Happen H:

Literally who gets to write what in games? Is it like "This is overlooked therefore everyone needs to write about it" or "You're not in the group stay away"? Give rules.

10. The game has a “Tolerance Skill”.

Conversation That Will Never Happen I:

Isn't this hilariously twee? Is it more or less twee than Burning Wheel’s “Elf Sadness” mechanic? Is there a level of twee that Indie RPGs shouldn't be?

11. The author is scared that the fact the game is, well, an RPG, means that the players could decide to do colonialist things. Why this would be bad in a game isn’t delved into much, but presumably it is because the author assumes 1 above is the universal reason for playing games despite 2 above.

Conversation That Will Never Happen J:

Isn't that entirely the adult players fault? Are we literally trying to tell shit people to hide their shittiness?

Conversation That Will Never Happen K:

Let's say that happens. Then what? Did everyone at the table literally either feel oppressed or get more racist? What's the consequentialist argument here?

12. The author then says Shadowrun’s politics are “a mess”. But somehow in this mess the author feels it encouraged stories the author thought were more good than bad.

Conversation That Will Never Happen L:

Your argument here is extremely subtle. Is it fair to hit authors over the head with a claim of moral wrongdoing when even the woke position is unclear and requires subtle arguments that even affected people have no consensus on?

13. The nut of the the thing:

“

Perhaps a way of understanding this is that Dragons Conquer America wants players to indulge in power fantasies of being both Cowboy and Indian. That doesn’t sit well with me. As an indigenous woman, I’m rarely afforded the opportunity to cut out Cortes’ still-beating heart and eat it as his soldiers quake in fear. But the options to enact violence against indigenous populations are many. A tabletop game that encourages me to play “both sides,” and create a party of indigenous characters working together with European invaders (no matter how historically accurate) feels bad in 2017. Especially when I can’t be assured that, in the end, we won’t still lose. Living as an indigenous person already means constantly being told that you lost.

“

Conversation That Will Never Happen M:

Are any approached besides "Hey but in the game you can win?" acceptable in 2017? Is there some precondition for them becoming acceptable?

Monday, November 13, 2017

So in the Maze of the Blue Medusa the party got in a fight with the obnoxious and imprisoned Milo DeFretwell.

DeFretwell then yelled a lot triggering a random encounter with some Nilbogs I think.

The Nilbogs were clever and dragged off a party member through a secret door.

It was also the secret door between the 2 sculptures in the maze where, if you walk between them, your eyes turn into gems.

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So....a lot of chaos and blind-firing later they extricate themselves.

Trade-Offs

Now, in other news they'd gone to the Goblin Market (chaos ensued, a goblin merchant stole all of someone's stuff then shrunk down and hid in a pumpkin, which pumpkin the PCs are still carrying around. The girls' last idea was to fart into it until he comes out but its best not to dwell on your friends' shortcomings)

...but the upshot is someone got ahold of the curse removing nut from the market.

So the gem-eye thing was removed with the nut and the gem-eye curse was in the nut, ready to be transferred elsewhere.

Tangents

The Maze, as those of you of wealth and taste such that you own a copy of Maze of the Blue Medusa may know, has an exit leading to the island of Eliator, where the inhabitants believe the Maze to be their underworld, and believe anyone coming out of it is a god.

The "gods"/PCs (whose previous relations with the Eliatorans have been...complex) arrive to find the villagers gone and the village burnt as bad breakfast.

A sole remaining Elatoran says that evil men came and stole them all taking them....to that distant island on the horizon!

If you don't know the gimmick, it's a system-neutral hexcrawl made to be super-immediately useful laid out by people who have been paying attention to the OSR RPG-design best practices and it also comes with a separate book--a "Field Guide" which is a partially-accurate guide to the hazards of the island written in-universe style which you can give to your group's Hermione and they'll love it and spew facts at everyone.

Anyway the important part here is soon there was a 20-foot-long 8-eyed centipede with 75 hp (I made it proportional to the cat toy I was using as a miniature) trying to pry open a giant crustacean on the beach and a cleric with a 4 Dex trying to sneak past it.

Shockingly a fight broke out.

It was pretty desperate, until the sorceress had an idea: pack a bunch of dead lobster around the cursed nut and shove it in the centipede's mouth.

This acorn bisque worked out. The party made quick work of the blind beast and scooped 8 eye-gems, each the size of a cantaloupe, out of its stupid face.

Onyx Path (publishers of the off-brand licensed World of Darkness stuff) and RPGnet have a reputation for taking performatively woke stances while supporting bad business practices and harassment campaigns and is either complicit in sexual impropriety or hanging one of their own out to dry without proof.

It's almost like a pattern.

It's almost like if you have a company where people lie all the time and don't think very hard about what they say, genuine abuse slips through the cracks really easily.

It's almost like when I complain about an RPG company I know what I'm talking about.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

There was another RPG scandal recently--either an author at (performatively woke publisher) Onyx Path author and moderator at (performatively woke forum) RPGnet is a rapist or RPGnet let someone go wild with false rape accusations against a moderator and author on their site and just twiddled their thumbs in return, doing nothing to address it, then kicked the guy out.

And before that there was the stealing money from freelancers and Kickstarter backers.

And the sexist ads.

And the libel.

It's customary at this point for people to write screeds about how backward the community is and how nerds are insular and resist change and how We Need To Do Something but............that is all spitting straight into a firehose.

This will never end.

The RPG community--at least online--will always have an abusive shitshow going on and if you want to make game stuff you gotta come to terms with that.

Why?

Because 90% of the vocal people in it are one of these kinds of people:

The RPG Dude Who Just Wants To Roll And Is So Sick Of This Drama!!

This guy likes playing! This guy sees the RPG community as a resource (which it, among other things, is) and dips in and gets online to find something useful to use--or to buy--or maybe even to think about--and then takes it back to a game table somewhere. "Why" this guy wonders "can't everyone do the same? Why does anyone ever have a problem ever?"

This guy will never change because despite all of this he can't stop talking about how much he hates drama. He talks about it pretty much constantly and about how silly he finds it. He does not get that this is, in itself, extending the drama (it makes more people ask about it and more people know about it and more people voice opinions about it--which is The Drama in a nutshell).

But you couldn't possibly convince him of that because that would deny him the ability to come grouse about these highfalutin RPG folk and their drama and therefore deny him the ability to sell his salt-of-the-earth self-image of himself to himself as somehow noble and not just willfully ignorant about like, maybe, genuine abuse his clicks and dollars pay for?

Paradoxically, suggesting he then shut up about the drama and just go ahead and access the parts of the community that he and his game table actually benefit from makes him feel angry like Holy Shit is someone telling me what to do? And this creates drama.

Popcorn Guy

Popcorn guy thinks of himself a lot like salt-of-the-earth Just Wants To Roll guy, but is one notch more self-aware--he actually enjoys watching people fight online and will admit it to himself and say so. Sometimes he even helps by trolling or tossing trollbait or writing anonymous messages to folks he knows will attribute them to the people they're fighting with. It's all in good fun. :D !

Popcorn Guy will never change because he's got nothing else. He fundamentally decided long ago not to have a life. Popcorn guy's idea of entertainment is--let's look at this objectively--not even Dungeons and Dragons but watching strangers argue about Dungeons and Dragons on his computer. This guy literally has such a low bar for an interesting life that there is no greater social reward you could offer him that would be more important than the glee of watching innocent people fend off crazy accusations online. Ending this would leave them only with their basement and their copy of Fate Core.

Cool Game Guy

Unlike the precious Guys, Cool Game Guy has produced interesting things. Cool Game Guy probably has a degree in something and has some life experiences, Cool Game Guy's takes on the drama are often nuanced and well-informed and take into account wider conflicts outside RPGs and consider social meanings and contexts--Cool Game Guy will write something and it will strike fellow Cool Game Guys as sane and middle-of-the-road and honest.

Cool Game Guy knows the history of games and maybe writing and art and knows that the quality of the work and the quality of the human do not always go hand-in-hand. Cool Game Guy has perspective and thinks y'all should just calm down.

However, Cool Game Guy will also never change anything because in the end Cool Game Guy tends to forget that they have (and benefit tremendously from having) an audience, which includes, you know, some people who are also smart and maybe even women and not-white people and queer people and people who do out-there stuff, due to people who stuck their necks out wayyyyyy farther than Cool Game Guy ever will. And if Cool Game Guy ever takes a risk, they The Cool Guy themselves will be stuck at the center of a drama they'll be damned if they don't fight and damned if they do.

Cool Game Guy will never accept that there are some things worth being aggressive and confrontational about because to do so would relinquish the sort of distance and ivory towerness and "perspective" that allows Cool Game Guy to make pronouncements that sound icily profound and get shared by all the other guys who have little enough skin in the game that a very eloquent "do nothing" sounds like legit advice.

This remove will serve Cool Game Guy well when he eventually becomes Professional Game Guy who can feel however they want about the drama but needs to avoid talking about it or telling the truth at all costs because the market will only punish them for caring about anyone else but themself.

Concerned Sadface

The Sadface insists they are not a member of any "outrage brigade"! The Sadface has feelings and doesn't understand why they don't have the right to have feelings! The Sadface insists they don't have an agenda! They just feel a certain way! And they want everyone to know that they feel that way about a specific person even if that sounds like a very specific accusation in a public place of what that person did that they can't prove and in fact isn't true just something they heard that makes them mad!

The Sadface believes in friendship and will support their friends and never ever check to see if their friends are telling the truth or whether the friends that they support are the exact kind of toxic people that they make abstracts complaints about all the time.

The Sadface talks a lot about empathy--but only for the people who play the same game as them or who talk about issues in the same language as them.

The Sadface will never change because The Sadface, above all, does not have the emotional energy to deal with tedious details like who said what when or did what when or whether the people that they're mad at (as opposed to the people they're mad on behalf of) are actually human beings. Paying too much attention to details about people they've decided to attack freaks them out and makes them cry. The only way The Sadface could ever change is:

1--Get enough therapy to realize that they have made some mistakes which extend the very abusive practices they rail against, and

2--Take the desperate and frightening step of risking actually pushing some of their friends away because those friends have done shitty things.

Current developments at RPGnet and Onyx Path and Green Ronin probably make The Concerned Sadface feel like the whole RPG community is a toxic mess and nothing is good (!!!?!), because they can't actually acknowledge the much scarier truth: a lot of the RPG community is just fine, the Sadface just had terrible judgment and has been backing the wrong horses for years because these wrong horses made the right noises about justice and safeness and played right into Sadface's fear of looking too deep into anything.

Righteous Troll

The Righteous Troll knows that what they're doing is technically dishonest but they've decided this is a war. They have a Nietzschean code--even though of course they never say that, because Nietzsche is for basic white boys and the righteous troll is Woke As Fuck. The answer to anyone disagreeing with them is a glib dismissal followed by trying to dunk on them in front of as wide an audience as possible. Who cares if you got the right guy? The point is you launched the drone strike and everybody felt good about it, not that it landed on the target or improved anything.

The righteous troll believes that they are a chaotic good vigilante in a war of all against all where the only possible way (or at least the only possible easy way) to get more justice (or at least more attention) is to be constantly, achingly dishonest in order to mobilize those earnest Sadfaces against people you don't like.

This Righteous Troll will never change because there's literally nowhere else for them to go. Changing their schtick or leaving games for some other place would be impossible because the only things on their resume are obnoxious troll skills and social capital they developed in front of a vanishing audience who was like 13 at the time and thought griefing people about Mega Man X was cool.

Going "Oh fuck, I just made up random shit about people for liking games I don't know for 10 years sorry everyone" just isn't practical at that point. Pretending they didn't just use accusations about rape, racism and sexuality as a political football against internet strangers for most of their adult life is probably the only thing keeping them from committing suicide.

The Professional

The Professional doesn't much contribute to the drama, it's true--except occasionally paying people who create it to stay in the business (which is probably the greatest most concrete contribution to the drama that you could make actually, if you think about it.)

The Professional doesn't want to take sides despite the fact that of course the Professional has created things and the space to do create these things was the result of people having stridently taken sides in times past.

On the one hand it's hard to blame The Professional for not playing a game that will only cost them money and which will only earn them hate and pain and lose them followers or fans--on the other hand the tragedy of it is The Professionals are the only ones who could genuinely solve these problems all by themselves without collective action. They are the only people with the reach and perceived moral authority to go "Hey! Quit beating on each other you little assholes!"

And this will never change because there just isn't enough money in the RPG business to get The Professionals to risk even a fraction of what they make taking a stand against someone who is causing trouble for all the little people.
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So, yeah, this is your game community. Because you asked for it.

As with everything else: If you didn't vote, you can't complain.
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Monday, November 6, 2017

Strangers feed on the anonymity of the city. Literally. Any residential building containing only occupants who do not know each others’ names and with at least five units will begin to attract Strangers. They put in applications like anyone else, generally have acceptable credit, and provide each other with references.

In public, they appear entirely human, but cannot go out in the same skin twice. The physical characteristics, style, and demeanor of theses skins, which rot off like peach peels after a day’s errands, cling to the local average.

Incapable of direct violence, but driven—like all species—to occupy as much space as they can, they spend their time attempting to quietly make human life nearby unpleasant so that real people will move. They make anonymous noise complaints, vote in favor of real estate developers, drive cars with piercing and hypersensitive alarms, cook meals they never eat solely to fill halls with inscrutable humid smells, interfere with cell towers, give 20s to only the violent panhandlers and call the police on the rest. At home they sag, shedding, onto Ikea chairs, buying credit default swaps, writing computer viruses, leaving drive-by comments on social media and masturbating to the worst porn.

Strangers avoid any interaction which might cause someone to ask their name—they have none. If engaged in any remotely intimate way, they make an excuse and flee. There are whole buildings, districts, perhaps even cities occupied only by Strangers.

Design Notes:

Strangers create an off-beat mystery story, heavy on investigation: Someone follows a person who goes into an apartment building and never comes out, or catches a Stranger in a minor act of irritating sabotage, or breaks into an apartment to discover nothing but a pile of J Crew and a headless face on the carpet. The party must then find a way to understand the nature of the infection, how far it’s spread, and do something about it.

Calm: 1

Agility: 1

Toughness: 1

Perception: 4

Appeal: 2

Cash: 3

Knowledge: 3

Calm Check: 7

Cards: Tower (16), Hermit (9)

Special abilities:

Isolationist metabolism: Strangers do not need to eat or breathe—they live off the alienation produced by creatures passing one another with no acknowledgement.

Skinchanging: Strangers grow a new skin in their sleep, different than any they’ve worn before.

Weaknesses:

Strangers cannot commit violence or speak names. Their ability to lie or create any kind of convincing narrative is very limited.